Tag Archives: Ed Miliband

Thank you Eds, Bob and Tom (and Greg)

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22nd December, 2010


On 10 December, Ed Balls sent out a link on twitter to an article he’d written about the LibDems serving as a fig-leaf to a radical right-wing government.  Quite right too.


I responded, “@edballsmp Good piece; now pls translate that into action. New PLP rule: don’t mention the LibDems?”


Nine days later:


Ed Miliband has banned the shadow cabinet from using the word “coalition” to describe the government because it sounds too moderate and reasonable, and fails to convey what he says is its true “ideological, rightwing agenda”.

 

In a memo to his front-bench team, obtained by the Observer, the Labour leader’s director of policy, Greg Beales, says that from now on they must use the term “Conservative-led government” to describe the alliance of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats.

 

(The Observer, 19 Dec 2010)


Thanks guys.  I’m sure you had that idea independently, but I am happy anyway.   I’ve been arguing for ages that the language of the er, Conservative-led government, has been brilliantly controlled and effective. 


Labour must respond in kind.


Calling Ed, Bob & Tom

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22nd December, 2010


In case you’ve been wondering where I’ve been lately, the answer is: on Twitter.  There are lots of things that are amazing about it.  Lots of things that are horrible too, but there.


One of the things Twitter is no good at is subtle arguments or packages of ideas.  You can’t always boil them down to 140 characters, and if you split your thoughts across 3 or 4 messages, someone will read you out of context and be confused.


So I still need my blog.


I wanted to say a couple of things about the Vince Cable story.  Vince has been tricked by a couple of female Telegraph journalists posing as giggling star-struck constituents into making at least two big mistakes.  Firstly, he boasted that if he was pushed too far he could use “the nuclear option” and resign from the government, which would (in his view) bring it down.  Secondly, we subsequently learn, he has “declared war on Mr Murdoch” and set himself against Rupert’s proposed buyout of BSkyB.  In response to the former boast, he was made to eat humble pie in Cabinet and out.  When the second element of the story broke, David Cameron withdrew Cable’s ministerial authority on the BSkyB transaction.


There are many issues raised by this turn of events.  My focus is on Labour’s response, which is troubling.


On Monday night, Cable had boasted about going nuclear and bringing down the government.  Labour’s response?  John Denham saying that this demonstrated the government was “paralysed by infighting”.  Of all the criticisms you can level at this government, paralysis is not one of them.  It is perhaps the busiest, most radical government in living memory.


Where are Bob Roberts and Tom Baldwin, Labour’s new spin doctors?  What are they thinking?  It could be that they were caught on the hop, it being Christmas and all, and needed an overnight to get their response straight.  That would have been disappointing, but worth it if they had come out the next morning fighting.  They didn’t.  On Tuesday John Denham went to press online with the same lame accusation of paralysis.  The pot, sadly, was calling the kettle black.


Surely there was an opportunity on Monday night for quick-fire political jibing.  Surely there was something in Cable’s unguarded comments which sharp minds at LPHQ could have fired right back at him.  I’m not arguing for glibness, just a sound-bite to tide us over before the measured response comes, as it surely will, from the political big guns.


But then, what about that measured response?  What does Ed Miliband say, the next day, when the story moves to its second stage and Cable throws away his credibility with daft comments on Murdoch?  He says that he, Ed, would have sacked him.


(Actually his response was smarter than that, to be fair – he said that “having apparently broken the ministerial code”, Cable should go.  He asked whether David Cameron had made the decision to keep him in post in the interests of the country, or just in the interests of the government.  The trouble is that all the press is going to hear is, “Miliband says Cable should have gone.”  And sure enough, the news tickers said exactly, and only, that.)


The trouble with an Opposition response which can be reduced to a call for resignation is that it sounds, and is, lazy.  Perhaps Ed Miliband thought it would help him to look stronger and more decisive than his counterpart, but we already know Ed can be ruthless.  And as for decisive, the flipside of that is to be collaborative and inclusive, qualities for which Cameron is rightly admired.  I fear Ed’s call for resignation only made Dave’s call for calm tolerance appear the more mature.


Ed Miliband was in a difficult position on this one because he wasn’t able to go in hard on the content.  Cable was only saying what a lot of people on the left want to hear on BSkyB, and I can’t imagine Ed Miliband being a stout defender of the Murdoch faith.  So Ed could only go on principle (the ministerial code) and on leadership qualities (“I’d have been tougher”).  Not thrilling.  Not enough.


What Ed so badly needs is a story for situations such as these.  He needs a line of attack on the government which sees past the headline events of the day (there are so many in these busy and uncharted waters) and gets to the nub of content.  Further, he needs to shape his critique so that it segues into a clear, passionate, inspired alternative policy offering.  He has hamstrung himself on this score by calling for an extended (two-year!) period of navel-gazing inside Labour.  If he leads from the front now with policy initiatives, it will be conspicuous that he is not waiting for his own policy review process.  If he waits, he will leave the public with nothing but his own sense of the Labour alternative to think about – a party, which in his own words, has “lost its way” (22 Nov 2010).


Ed’s is not a difficult choice.  Waiting is the worse of the two options.  If Cable shows us anything, it shows us that the Coalition is fragile.  If things “go nuclear”, Labour will need a leader.  Now.





What Have I Done To David?

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29th September, 2010



Is it just me, or did the cutaways during Ed Miliband’s first speech as Labour leader reveal a squirming, rueful conference audience?  Is it just me, or did those expressions read: Dear God, what have we done?


Clearly a lot of those present had supported Ed’s leadership campaign.  And those who hadn’t will now get in behind him for the good of the party.  But whichever camp they had been in, it looked as if it was suddenly dawning on all of them: David would have to go, and the Labour front-bench would lose its most charismatic player.


Some of them will have been thinking: we need the break from the past that Ed offers us.  Others will have thought we may not have needed it, but let’s take it anyway and draw some lines under Blairism, Brownism, Iraq.  But mostly I reckon they were thinking: what have we done?


It’s as if Labour had always assumed it would be able to have both Milibands on the team.  It could have had Ed under David.  But it could never have had David under Ed.  Did nobody think that through?  I know I didn’t, but that’s because I thought David would walk it.


Ed won it on the 5th round, and on the union votes, not those of the PLP or ordinary members.  When we see Ed speaking for Labour, we’re going to see a man who is there because of the unions.  That is not undoable, and it is an electoral handicap.  It will identify Ed with the forthcoming union resistance to the Coalition’s cuts, which in turn will make a nuanced Labour position on the deficit impossible.  The Conservatives, who have succeeded in keeping the argument binary – you either cut or you spend – could not have scripted a better outcome.


When we see Ed speaking for Labour, we’re going to see the man who denied us David; the man who got where he got by stabbing his own brother in the back.  Ed’s supporters can argue all they like that he had the right to stand, even the duty to stand.  Of course.  But the reality is that Ed’s success required the political assassination of his brother, while David’s did not. 


Ed seized his chance.  He had seen his own brother dither, and he wasn’t going to do the same thing.  (Although it’s said that Ed helped persuade David not to stand against Brown, ironically.)  In the end Ed’s was a winning decision, and you can’t take that away from him.  But was it thought-through?   Rumour has it that, when he learned of his victory, Ed turned to Sadiq Khan and asked, “What have I done to David?”  Whether that rumour is true or not, the victory already seems Pyrrhic, the stage already lacklustre without David’s presence.


The ‘Harman moment’  (in which David rebuked her for applauding Ed’s anti-Iraq stance) proved that David had no choice but to retreat to the back benches.  Labour’s only hope is that this retreat will work, that the man whom a thrilled Hillary Clinton described as “vibrant, attractive, vital” can melt into the political background.  That is Ed’s only chance of a ‘clear field’ in which to define himself and ‘NextGen’ Labour. 


I’ll believe it when I see it.